OpenText Pulls Ahead in Cyber Resilience with Carbonite Purchase

OpenText has completed its $1.42 billion acquisition of Carbonite, which acquired Webroot last year for more than $600 million.

Carbonite provides cloud-based subscription data protection, backup, disaster recovery and endpoint security to SMBs and consumers. It has more than 300,000 SMB customers, 14,000 MSPs and 7 million professional users.

The acquisition is a continuation of OpenText’s “total growth strategy” both through acquisitions and organic growth, the company said.

Mark Barrenechea, OpenText’s CEO and CTO, said Carbonite brings a “world-class channel organization and partners, allowing OpenText to bring enterprise information management (EIM) to all-size customers.”

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Craig Stilwell, OpenText’s executive vice president/general manager of SMB and consumer, talks about what’s in store for partners now that the acquisition is final.

Channel Futures: What will this acquisition mean for OpenText’s various types of partners and will it create new opportunities for them?

Carbonite’s Craig Stilwell

Craig Stilwell: This acquisition really positions OpenText as the leader in cyber resilience, and cyber resilience is really about protecting endpoints as well as providing really robust disaster recovery. Protecting endpoints and protecting end users starts with training. There are a lot of bad guys out there who employ phishing techniques, and malware and viruses, etc., and knowing what to do and what not to do from an end-user perspective starts with security awareness training. But then bad things are still going to get through regardless of what an end user does and that’s really where the Webroot SecureAnywhere products, and their DNS and Wi-Fi protection, come into play to stop the bad things from happening.

However, occasionally bad things are still going to happen whether from malware or virus, or ransomware, or natural disasters, and so end users … need the opportunity to be able to recover from those incidents and this acquisition really gives OpenText a full suite of products aimed at making their customers more resilient. OpenText has a really large portfolio of products and several of those products, especially those that are security-focused, are going to make sense to bring into the SMB and consumer business unit right off the bat. At the same time, there are products within the Carbonite and Webroot portfolio sthat are going to make sense in big enterprise as well. And so there’s a bit of a two-way synergy going on, both up market and down market.

CF: Is this acquisition going to give OpenText and its partners a competitive advantage?

CS: Particularly in the SMB space, OpenText is now more dedicated than ever to partners, and so within the SMB group we are 100% partner-first and we are going to continue to leverage the network of 36,000 MSPs, channel partners, resellers and OEMs that we use to reach over 21 million end users. So we’re going to be extremely partner-first in our routes to market for SMB and consumer, and we were on this journey as part of Carbonite to bring Webroot and Carbonite together, and really consolidate partner programs and be easier to do business with. We have the opportunity to continue on that mission right now and make our partner programs more …